After a move and putting my Taig mill back together, I found the steppers didn't move even though the system worked perfectly when I took it apart 6 months ago. Mach 3 shows the movement, the motors give the normal slight "clunk" on starting the controller. Recently I was given a newer machine running Vista Basic and replaced the old XP machine. I bought a parallel port card and new cable, installed the Vista patch and ran drivertest.exe (Excellent, then OK). Same problem. The motors even heat up a bit as before.
I assume the problem is not the new parallel port address, AC00. I put AC00 in Ports & Pins as 0xAC00 instead of the typical 0x378 and so Mach 3 should recognize the port. Right? So, I'm down to power supply or Gecko controller and have no idea what to do next. There are no loose wires. I took the controller and the X axis motor off the Taig and tried them separately with the same lack of movement.
Any suggestions? BTW, I always seem to have a problem downloading Mach. The downloading either stops a few seconds into the downloading or downloads instantly but Windows says the file didn't complete. I finally got version 030.